Glamour in the Mountains

It is just as well for us that the nature of fashion takes one of the best outdoor regions in the world and turns them into hip-happening places to go, full of small town wonders that make you feel like you are in a shrunken (but awesome) metropolis - think St Barts. Wonderful hubby treated me, and himself of course, to a luxury weekend in the Canadian Rockies. I expected beautiful scenery and was not disappointed, and also luxury accomodation (will always and forever love Fairmont Hotels - check out www.fairmont.com). But we got so much more. The town of Jasper is not so fabulous, could in fact be so much cooler. But drive five minutes to Jasper Park Lodge which looks out over a turqoise lake and snowy peaks, and you can enjoy a world-class cocktail at a variety of bars, eat great steak or seafood at your choice of five restaurants and shop for international brands at bloody awfully priced boutiques. Yay!! The next day took us through the Icefields Parkway - heralded as the most beautiful mountain pass in the world - and into Banff. I. want. to. live. there. Forever. Banff is a ski town, where the buildings are quaint and the bars are full of drunk students. But more than that, there are organic bakeries and coffee houses, up-market Canadian styled bars (proving that this is not a contradiction), a Louis Voitton shop and beautiful boutique hotels. We stayed at the Fairmont Banff Springs which is a gorgeous Scottish castle-inspired building built in 1889 - a veritable maze of corridors all leading to tucked away restaurants and bars.

Another thing we really enjoyed about our mini-break (love to hate that term!) was the people we met. Our horizons were broadened from the mainly trailer-park inbred population of our own small town to tourists and travellers from around the world. We met the eccentric, the common, the fabulous and the pretty. Needless to say, this won't be our last trip into the mountains - scenery and civilization!

What is Canada, anyway?

What do people think of when Canada is mentioned? Not much apparently, from the indication of their glazed-over eyes. An extension of America? With a bit of the UK and French culture in the mix, but really a humongous and barren state of the good ol' US of A. A place where millions of people are scattered (90%) within 100 miles of the American border, and believe me not just because of the cold. A place where the cities are nice, but not that big. Or famous. And there's not that many of them. A nice place that has problems like all countries but doesn't seem to do much bad on the news, or make the news very much at all. But hey, who wants to be nice these days?

Yeah, I hear you say, so why move there? Well first of all I don't like to call it a move, thank you very much. A temporary relocation is what I prefer, although that gets a little long in conversation. Secondly, it happened for very good reasons. Or so we thought at the time. Reasons like financial security (uh-huh - the polite way of saying moolah), travel and adventure. With a time limit of 24 months - whether minimum or maximum remains to be seen.

I won't bother telling you the name of our town. You won't know it, really you won't. But I will tell you that it is a lot like hundreds of others. Small but with all the facilities that people here think essential, ugly but safe, clean most of the year round. Slap bang in the middle of Alberta which is slap bang in the middle of the country. Oh yeah, and a couple of hours drive from Edmonton, my closest city for a long time which at least houses the biggest mall in the world. I'm still trying to find the coffee shops, art galleries, intimate bistros and up-market boutiques.